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It's time to get out your ballgowns and tuxedos. FQXi is rolling out the red carpet and inviting you to join us as we announce the winners of our first ever video contest: "Show Me The Physics!"

As Brendan hinted in an earlier post, the judges have now made their decisions. The three top prize winners will be walking away with $10,000. We are also awarding $3000 each to the best video by a young scientist and to the creator of the audience's top pick. We're also distributing a large number of discretionary prizes for videos that impressed us, educated us, or just amused us in some way.

So join FQXi's directors Max Tegmark and Anthony Aguirre (along with some special guests) as they open the envelopes. Will there be tearful acceptance speeches? We shall see.

The event: The FQXi Video Contest Award Ceremony 2014

The time: Friday 5 December, 1:30pm ET

The place: Here

In the meantime, thank you to all entrants and to everyone who viewed, rated and commented on the videos. You can still enjoy them all here.

*Edited on 4 December 2014 to add that there's more exciting news! Max and Anthony will also be revealing more about the next grant round *and* FQXi's essay contest, launching soon.

**Edited on 8 December 2014 to add that here is the full list of winners. Congratulations to them all, and thank you to everyone who took part.

Just to add, if you were one of the people who were kind enough to enter this year's contest, please don't forget to tune in and watch. The judges enjoyed so many entries --for very different reasons - that we'll be giving away a *lot* of prizes. So if you do tune in you may be pleasantly surprised to find out that you're a winner!

Judging from the quotes below, the only reasonable topic for the next essay contest is:

Is Einstein's Special Relativity Wrong?

Joao Magueijo, Faster Than the Speed of Light, p. 250: "Lee [Smolin] and I discussed these paradoxes at great length for many months, starting in January 2001. We would meet in cafés in South Kensington or Holland Park to mull over the problem. THE ROOT OF...

Judging from the quotes below, the only reasonable topic for the next essay contest is:

Is Einstein's Special Relativity Wrong?

Joao Magueijo, Faster Than the Speed of Light, p. 250: "Lee [Smolin] and I discussed these paradoxes at great length for many months, starting in January 2001. We would meet in cafés in South Kensington or Holland Park to mull over the problem. THE ROOT OF ALL THE EVIL WAS CLEARLY SPECIAL RELATIVITY. All these paradoxes resulted from well known effects such as length contraction, time dilation, or E=mc^2, all basic predictions of special relativity. And all denied the possibility of establishing a well-defined border, common to all observers, capable of containing new quantum gravitational effects."

WHAT SCIENTIFIC IDEA IS READY FOR RETIREMENT? Steve Giddings: "Spacetime. Physics has always been regarded as playing out on an underlying stage of space and time. Special relativity joined these into spacetime... (...) The apparent need to retire classical spacetime as a fundamental concept is profound..."

Nima Arkani-Hamed 06:11: "Almost all of us believe that space-time doesn't really exist, space-time is doomed and has to be replaced by some more primitive building blocks."

"And by making the clock's tick relative - what happens simultaneously for one observer might seem sequential to another - Einstein's theory of special relativity not only destroyed any notion of absolute time but made time equivalent to a dimension in space: the future is already out there waiting for us; we just can't see it until we get there. This view is a logical and metaphysical dead end, says Smolin."

"Was Einstein wrong? At least in his understanding of time, Smolin argues, the great theorist of relativity was dead wrong. What is worse, by firmly enshrining his error in scientific orthodoxy, Einstein trapped his successors in insoluble dilemmas..."

In the real world, the speed of light is variable - it does depend on the speed of the light source, as predicted by Newton's emission theory of light. Unfortunately we all live in Einstein's world where the speed of light is, by postulation, constant (independent of the speed of the light source), and space and time are disfigured so as to form an efficient "protecive belt" around the false...

In the real world, the speed of light is variable - it does depend on the speed of the light source, as predicted by Newton's emission theory of light. Unfortunately we all live in Einstein's world where the speed of light is, by postulation, constant (independent of the speed of the light source), and space and time are disfigured so as to form an efficient "protecive belt" around the false postulate:

"Lakatos distinguished between two parts of a scientific theory: its "hard core" which contains its basic assumptions (or axioms, when set out formally and explicitly), and its "protective belt", a surrounding defensive set of "ad hoc" (produced for the occasion) hypotheses. (...) In Lakatos' model, we have to explicitly take into account the "ad hoc hypotheses" which serve as the protective belt. The protective belt serves to deflect "refuting" propositions from the core assumptions..."

Imre Lakatos, Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes: "All scientific research programmes may be characterized by their 'hard core'. The negative heuristic of the programme forbids us to direct the modus tollens at this 'hard core'. Instead, we must use our ingenuity to articulate or even invent 'auxiliary hypotheses', which form a protective belt around this core, and we must redirect the modus tollens to these. It is this protective belt of auxiliary hypotheses which has to bear the brunt of tests and get adjusted and readjusted, or even completely replaced, to defend the thus-hardened core."

Banesh Hoffmann is quite clear: the Michelson-Morley experiment confirms the variable speed of light predicted by Newton's emission theory of light unless there is a protective belt ("contracting lengths, local time, or Lorentz transformations") that deflects the refuting experimental evidence from the false constant-speed-of-light postulate:

"Relativity and Its Roots", Banesh Hoffmann, p.92: "Moreover, if light consists of particles, as Einstein had suggested in his paper submitted just thirteen weeks before this one, the second principle seems absurd: A stone thrown from a speeding train can do far more damage than one thrown from a train at rest; the speed of the particle is not independent of the motion of the object emitting it. And if we take light to consist of particles and assume that these particles obey Newton's laws, they will conform to Newtonian relativity and thus automatically account for the null result of the Michelson-Morley experiment without recourse to contracting lengths, local time, or Lorentz transformations. Yet, as we have seen, Einstein resisted the temptation to account for the null result in terms of particles of light and simple, familiar Newtonian ideas, and introduced as his second postulate something that was more or less obvious when thought of in terms of waves in an ether."

Richard Feynman, "QED: The strange theory of light and matter", p. 15: "I want to emphasize that light comes in this form - particles. It is very important to know that light behaves like particles, especially for those of you who have gone to school, where you probably learned something about light behaving like waves. I'm telling you the way it does behave - like particles. You might say that it's just the photomultiplier that detects light as particles, but no, every instrument that has been designed to be sensitive enough to detect weak light has always ended up discovering the same thing: light is made of particles."